As someone who maintains about 70 PCs and Macs, I love the idea. Then I would only have to maintain the server and not worry about desktops - which account for 95% of problems. If a dumb terminal has a problem, replace the hardware - problem solved. Having to maintain individual operating systems and installed application bases sucks. The web is only horrible as an applications interface if horrible programmers write the applications.

One that the author of the game, Richard Adams, built himself. There's a link to some background, including pictures, in the first link in TFS, but since this is Slashdot and people don't like to RTFS, here the link [exoticsciences.com].

It was a one off homebrew. Back then you could get a hell of a lot of chips straight from the manufacturers and guys would often cook up these 'one offs" mixing and matching all kinds of parts and then stuff them into Altair style cases. I don't think there was a COTS 16 bit PC until the mid 80s though.

man kids today don't know how easy they have it, why even the COTS computers of the day basically just gave you a cursor prompt and you were on your own, if you wanted it to actually do anything you had to

No game can be complete without DLC, multiple levels of hardware-enforced DRM, anti-trading policies, forced to be on the Internet every second of play, and random bans of networked IDs just to show that the game company means business, and that the debugger installed with VS *might* be considered a hacking tool.